I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

..And I don’t need to say another damned word, huh? The title has directly downloaded itself via your optic nerves into your hypothalamus; right now the room is almost painfully bright and there’s a taste of bananas and electricity in the back of your mouth. Light sabers. Kurosawa. Slow-motion combat scenes. You did not know that such a thing might be allowed to exist.

This is what it is like to be pandered to, my Star Wars droogies. This is how it feels to have impersonal forces casually shuck your carapace so that they may then feast upon your succulent money.

While nothing can top last year’s mega-huge reveal that Disney was buying LucasFilm with an eye toward making a brand-new trilogy, today’s announcement that Zack Snyder will direct a standalone Star Wars film separate from that new trilogy is still pretty massive.

Vulture broke the news this afternoon, stating that Snyder – who took himself out of the running for directing the newly-announced Episode VII – will instead develop a new Star Wars project for the company. The new feature will be inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s seminal Seven Samurai, and will apparently run parallel to events in the new trilogy.

Also: apparently we didn’t need to get stuff like this over George Lucas’ dead body. Who knew? (more…)